


Easy and luxurious failure

by applecrumbledore



Category: The Venture Bros
Genre: It has been a rough year and I'm allowed write something so horrifically lame, M/M, Season 3 Spoilers, Season 4 Spoilers, Season 6 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:15:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28160781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applecrumbledore/pseuds/applecrumbledore
Summary: Brock wasn’t historically his type, but he didn’t think much about it. He had arms like a ten-car pileup and an ass like a clingstone peach, and that kind of thing transcended gender. The man half-listened to his ancient stories, humoured him when pressed and made him breakfast a couple times a week. He knew real couples who got by on less.
Relationships: Brock Samson/Rusty Venture
Comments: 19
Kudos: 61





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is cheesy enough that I deeply considered posting it on my secret burner account that I made to post a cuphead fic.

Brock waxed his Charger in the driveway outside the hangar; it was late afternoon, objectively the most depressing time of day, and unseasonably hot. Doc was stationed several yards away in a lawn chair, balancing a watery mai tai on his chest. Brock’s arms baked to a salmony pink in the sun and Doc watched. He didn’t have anything better to do, not these days, if he ever did. There was never anything on TV until after dinner, he wasn’t working on anything that kept his interest and the boys, wherever they were, didn’t need his supervision. So he watched. If Brock cared, he didn’t say anything, but he had no doubt that he noticed him. Brock reminded him of a shark, sometimes: the eerie stillness, the menace, the observant, dead eyes. It used to freak him out to know that he was constantly being watched, but after so many years, it stopped bothering him. He liked trying to get a rise out of him, like egging on the Queen’s Guard.

Watching him back was somewhat new, and he wasn’t getting paid to do it like Brock was; it was either boredom or something darker, and he wasn’t in a position to do enough soul-searching to find out which one. His lack of introspection was a self-preservation instinct. He had settled into his failure a long time ago, wrapping the safety of it around him like an old, worn robe—no one expected anything of him anymore. A new norm had been calibrated. It didn’t matter who his father was because everyone finally knew who _he_ was: a failure. And it was so easy. He could be the slimy kind of guy who ogled his bodyguard while lying on a cheap plastic lawn chair, high and drunk at two in the afternoon, because he was already that guy. He had always been that guy. Failure was easy, luxurious and free.

Brock wasn’t historically his type, but he didn’t think much about it. He had arms like a ten-car pileup and an ass like a clingstone peach, and that kind of thing transcended gender. The man half-listened to his ancient stories, humoured him when pressed and made him breakfast a couple times a week. He knew couples who got by on less.

Brock dropped his rag on the hood of the car.

“Doc.” He shielded his eyes from the sun, looking his way across the lawn. “I’m gonna grab a beer, you want anything?”

Doc jangled his melting ice at him and smiled. “Surprise me.”

—

In August, he was snatched out of the canned goods aisle of the grocery store by some reclusive nut who thought he was developing weapons of mass destruction to allow the federal government to overthrow state rights. He wondered if there would ever be a point in his life where he wasn’t regularly kidnapped. At least now, it was usually his own fault and not (usually) his father’s.

He spent a day and a half in a shanty in some unknown location, tied to a chair and missing his communicator watch. By the sound of the wind whistling through the clapboard it was either by the sea or somewhere high up, he couldn’t tell. He was delirious from hunger and shivering cold. The guy didn’t show back up and he suspected that whatever the other parts of his hair-brained scheme were, they hadn’t gone well. Or Brock had killed him.

At dawn, a crowbar wrenched a rotted part of the wall down and Brock appeared, silhouetted by the pink-blue pre-morning sky. There was nothing behind him, only clouds.

“Doc. You hurt?”

“My pride, maybe. Where _are_ we?”

Brock was wearing some kind of harness cinched up over his tight and clipped with carabiners and rope. His eyes roved over the shack as he stepped through the broken wall.

“A peak near Mount Elbert. No idea how he got you up here unconscious.” The blade of his knife was cool and hard against his bound wrists as he sliced the rope apart. “You eaten? I brought those Nature Valley bars you like.”

“Oh, thank God.” He rubbed his wrists and stood, cracking his back. Brock rummaged around in a small backpack and handed him a granola bar.

“They never feed you.”

“Right? Back in my day, kidnapping meant something. I got some of the best meals of my life from kidnappers.” He stepped around the wreckage of the wall and peered outside. The shack was on narrow, rocky outcropping halfway up a mountain, with a forest of scrubby trees spread out miles below. “Maybe only boy geniuses get good meals.”

Brock approached the ledge next to him, peering over the side. “The Monarch feeds you pretty good. Or the boys say so, anyways.”

“That doesn’t count.” Doc looked down. Brock was clipped into some metal thing he’d wedged at their feet, and rope trailed down over the ledge and out of sight. “You climbed up here?”

Brock grunted. “Like I said. I don’t know how he got you up here.” He fished a crumpled pack of smokes out of his pocket and lit one. They spent another moment looking out over the Rockies, then Brock turned to him. “Well. Hope your withdrawal’s not too bad, ‘cause we’re climbing down.”

“I don’t get withdrawals.”

“You’ve been up here, what, forty hours? Come on. You get squirrely after ten.”

The nausea and shaking were from the cold and muscle spasms from being tied to a chair for a day and a half. The fact that he hadn’t been fully sober in weeks was irrelevant. He crunched on his granola bar.

“You’re getting too familiar, Samson.”

“You like it,” Brock said absent-mindedly, fiddling with the knot in the rope that went through his harness. “I didn’t have a harness for you, so you’re gonna get tethered to me. Quickest.”

Doc peered over the ledge again, his head spinning. “You just jump?”

“You anchor up top and rappel down.” He extended an arm towards him. “C’mere.”

He hesitated. Brock rolled his eyes and grabbed the front of his jumpsuit to haul him in.

“Hey!”

“Don’t be a wuss.” He took a section of the rope and looped it around Doc’s waist, then set about tying a complicated knot, his head bowed. “You need to like… work out, or something. Something to make you harder to nab.”

Doc knew it was forty hours of seclusion talking, but the closeness was making him lightheaded. Or else it was the heights. Or the last forty _years_ of seclusion.

“What can I say, I’m naturally svelte,” he said weakly. “Aerodynamic.”

Brock chuckled. “Do you remember when the feds were after you for that ‘misunderstanding’ and I had to sneak you past security at LaGuardia in a hockey bag?”

He could taste his breath. Cigarettes and, lingering on his hair, incense. Like some twenty-year-old stoner.

“Stuffed in a bag like some rich lady’s lapdog.”

“Aerodynamic,” Brock agreed. He slapped him on the shoulder and stepped away. “Alright, get on my back.”

“Christ, a piggyback? Save me _some_ scrap of my dignity, please.”

“I need my hands.” He stooped down. “Up.”

Doc grudgingly climbed onto Brock’s bowed back and put his arms around his neck, and Brock started to rappel down over the edge.

“You’re sweaty,” he complained.

“I just climbed a mountain,” Brock said stiffly, concentrating. “You’re welcome.”

Doc hooked a chin over his shoulder and watched the rope slip slowly through his big, scarred hands as he walked down the mountain face. It was strangely soothing to have his arms around his neck, to feel the steady movement of his body. His back was hard and warm like the hood of an idling car. 

“Why do you know how to do this?”

“Day one training. Some things can only be climbed.”

It was easy to forget that Brock was a highly trained killing machine and not an out-of-touch himbo with a technical college degree. What a feat it was to have both an herb garden and a license to kill.

“Maybe I’ll start working out,” Doc mumbled, resting his cheek on the back of his head. “For safety.”

Brock snorted. “Yeah, right.”

“I could! Maybe this is the year I turn my life around.”

“Your life’s fine, Doc.” His foot slipped and rock skittered down below. “Invent, like… a muscle machine, like in Captain America.”

“God. Can you imagine? I wouldn’t need a bodyguard.”

He laughed. “I’d have to start paying rent.”

There was something surprisingly sweet about that. The whole thing with the orb happened a few months later and Brock disappeared, so it didn’t mean much, but at the time it was sweet.

—

Things were tiring after Brock left. Doc couldn’t put his finger on it. Everything ran together, more so than usual for a guy who didn’t know how old he was without doing the math backwards from his birthdate. He was forever eight years old, tied to a plinth in some Egyptian tomb and crying for a father that showed up too late, and somehow, simultaneously, he was seventy-five, popping barbiturates he bought from a crooked pharmacology student to mellow out the amphetamines he got from another pharmacology student, and pretending to ignore the pain in his abdomen that was definitely not liver failure. It was exhausting to be alive, but he couldn’t remember a time when that wasn’t true.

Hatred was too hands-on and too touchy-feely and everything that had been unspoken with Brock had to be spoken again and it was… exhausting. He was fine, but it was like someone had snuck into his house and rearranged all the furniture. It wasn’t right.

He got a research contract splicing Arctic char DNA with human stem cells to make frost-resistant embryos for a mining company in the Siberian snow fields. He didn’t ask specifics but assumed they were creating some kind of illegally bred arctic workforce. As usual, it was none of his business. They didn’t know about the cloning lab and _he_ wasn’t doing the breeding. It was infuriating test-fail-test-fail slow-going work that drove him crazy, but at least it was something to think about.

He hauled himself out of the lab one evening and plodded through the house to the kitchen to scrape together something to eat. Dean sat at the table picking at an appalling-looking sandwich he’d built out of old lunch meat and dollar store cheese.

“Hiya, Pop. How’s the fish project treating you?”

“Sapping my will to live. How’s puberty?”

He thought about it for a second. “About the same.”

Doc peered into the fridge in search of something halfway edible and found a cucumber that was furry like a cat’s tail and an opened jar of tomato sauce that had gone hard. He never realized how much cooking Brock did until he was gone, partially because it wasn’t his job and thus took a back seat to the flashier services he provided, like murder and espionage, and partially because the stimulants meant he rarely ate.

“So, how are you doing?” Dean asked from behind him. “Really.”

He kept rooting around in the fridge for a morsel of anything. “Save me the time and spit it out, I know there’s something you want.”

Dean sighed. Bingo.

“I know we’re not supposed to talk about it,” he said meekly, “but are you going to start dating again? I’ve been doing some reading, and I think I’m supposed to encourage you to get back on that horse or something.”

Doc snorted. “Dean, I haven’t ‘started dating’ in twenty years. You’re a little late to _Parent Trap_ me.”

“It’s only been a few months! And there are apps now! If you want me to set you up a profile, I can take some snazzy photos that—”

“Oh please, I know what _apps_ are, I’m a—” He stopped. He turned around. “A few months since what?”

“Since Brock left.”

He said it so easily. A thousand unnoticed implications slid together in Doc’s head like a puzzle box.

“You think Brock and I…”

“Okay, listen, Pop, Hank and I have been talking, and—” He wrung his hands. This was a speech he’d practiced. “We’re grown-ups now, you don’t have to keep pretending we don’t know. Hank’s more insulted than I am about it, he’s mad that Brock never—”

“Wh— We weren’t _together_ , Dean.”

They stared at each other for a handful of mortifying seconds. He watched horror slowly draw over Dean’s face as he went through a similar, backwards kind of realizing to his own. Two people learning that they’d been speaking different languages the entire time.

“You’re joking.”

“ _I’m_ joking? Why on earth would you think we were together?”

“We thought you were just being macho about it!” He wailed. “Or that keeping it a secret was a _security_ thing, I don’t know! Hank and I talk about it all the time!” He covered his face with his hands. “This is so humiliating.”

“Oh, _you’re_ humiliated? My own sons think I’m gay! Gay and a coward! You’d do this to your own father?”

“I have to go!” He stood up so quickly he banged a knee on the underside of the table and ran out of the room pretending it didn’t hurt.

—

Doc invited Orpheus over for midday cocktails on the patio because seeing a man who looked like a vampire sitting under his yellow sun umbrella sipping a Long Island iced tea always cheered him up. The man had been walking on eggshells around him lately and he didn’t like to admit it, but he preferred it when they were on good terms. He was one of only a handful of other adults on the compound and he didn’t like to drive for companionship.

“It’s Hatred, right? You don’t like him?” He squinted at Orpheus through his sunglasses, crossing one knobbly knee over the other. “I didn’t either at first, but he’s growing on me. He cries less these days.”

“That is… good.”

“He’s still getting used to the compound and made this god-awful map he carries around with him everywhere, it’s embarrassing. I remember when Brock started, he’d just go on these long, silent walks, like a monk. Kept the whole thing in his head.”

“Brock Samson was an agreeable man when he wanted to be. He will be missed.” He sipped his drink, failing to suppress a grimace at the alcohol. “Things feel different around the compound now.”

“Hank’s a mess,” Doc admitted, “the kid worshipped him. And the _house_ is a mess, do you know if he actually cleaned? Or did he hire someone? I have no idea how I don’t know, but the kitchen floors look like a truck stop bathroom now. And I can’t remember the code to my little security safe for the life of me, Brock did all that.”

Orpheus nodded sagely. “When people are gone, their absence leaves a hole in our life in unexpected ways. Sometimes the little things take up our focus as a kind of salve on the soul.”

Doc knew a Wife Story was coming. “I guess.”

“When my wife left, I was so angry that _I_ had to deal with the accountant now, it was all I could think about. But it wasn’t about the accountant, it was about her.” He leaned in. “How are _you_ doing?”

Doc waved his hand.

“Oh, I’m—hey, you’ll get a kick out of this, listen—the boys thought we were _dating_ ,” he leered. “Can you believe that? Me and Brock. The mouths of babes, eh?”

Orpheus’ shoulders went stiff. “I… see.”

“Isn’t that insane? If I’d known homeschooling would make them this stunted, I would have sent them to public school years ago. Better they knock someone up than… this.”

Orpheus set his drink down slowly and carefully. He leaned back so he was more shaded by the umbrella. “I am… confused.”

“Come on, the public school system in this state is a cesspool. If I sent them starting in middle school, they’d be so socially inept that they’d go crazy with the freedom and high-fructose corn syrup they peddle in those cafeterias, it’d be a few months before—”

“Not that,” Orpheus said, “I… This is a delicate matter.”

“What?”

“I—I’m never sure how to read you at the best of times, to say nothing of when Brock Samson is involved. You have this way of speaking that makes every word you say sound sarcastic and I’m not sure what to _do_ with it, so usually I just nod along until you—”

“What about Brock?”

Orpheus steepled his fingers. “Were you not in some kind of an… arrangement? Physical or romantic in nature?”

Doc squeezed his eyes shut. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I was never sure how to broach the subject. Al sounded quite sure about it and I trust his, ah, _gaydar_ in situations such as these, pardon the language. I can’t say I understood the match, but you both seemed happy enough and it was, frankly, none of my business.” 

“What do you mean, an arrangement? You think I was _paying him_ or something? For—”

“No! Well—I don’t know! You’re a modern man, far be it from me to—”

“Oh my God! You people think nothing of me!” He knocked back the rest of his drink. “Do I have an aura? Some sad, pining, gay aura? Don’t answer that. Don’t tell me what Al thinks. I don’t believe this.”

“I didn’t mean to offend. I thought you wanted me to ask.” Another sip. “You aren’t sleeping with him, then?”

“No! You don’t think I would have told you?”

“You can be, ah… hamfistedly homophobic at times. I thought you were _dealing with something_.”

Doc scoffed. “If I were fucking something that looked like Brock, I’d broadcast it. I’d put it in my goddamn Christmas cards.”

Orpheus glanced at him sidelong. “He _was_ in the cards you sent last year. You posed in the foyer with the boys. The one where you asked everyone to Venmo you to help pay for the roof repairs.”

“That was just business, three people look sad on a Christmas card. And he added a level of threat to the request that I thought really worked. Dean designed them, anyways.”

He didn’t appreciate the look Orpheus gave him.

“Right.”

—

Hank was in the shower and Hank’s jacket—Brock’s jacket—was lying on his bed. It was the first time he’d seen it not on Hank since Brock left it, whenever it was that Brock left it. He picked it up; it weighed a ton and it was just denim, but it was so big. He brought it to his face and buried his nose in the sheepskin collar. It still smelled like cigarettes and sweat and incense, like Brock, despite Hank’s constant wear. It held his scent better than his communicator watch, at least.

—

Autumn waned and he did something he hadn’t done in years: hauled his dusty old telescope out of the attic and set it up on the patio. When he was a kid, a vague interest in ‘space’ was the first thing that pulled him out of ‘boy adventurer’ and into ‘scientist.’ There wasn’t much money in space and he quickly drifted to more weaponized genres of super-science, but there was always something soothing about stargazing. He felt small and meaningless every day and it was reassuring to have it confirmed by the galaxy outside his own neuroses.

He went out in his jacket with a hot toddy sitting on a small camp table and spent thirty minutes re-remembering how the telescope worked. It was cold for an early autumn night and his breath kept fogging up his glasses. For starters, he was looking for the Andromeda galaxy, the light of which was so faint that it couldn’t be seen by looking directly at it and could only be observed when one looked next to it. He liked the unreality of it.

The patio door creaked behind him and he looked over his shoulder. Hank leaned in the doorway sucking on a Capri Sun.

“Dean says you’re not gay.”

Doc turned around and pressed his eye to the telescope again. “Dean is correct.”

“Then why do you dress like that?”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response. Can I help you with something?”

“You can help me know why Brock left us.” His voice signaled _difficult_. Hank was always difficult lately. “What did you do to him?”

“I didn’t do anything, Hank. It has nothing to do with me.”

“But you were secretly married, right? Like, since the 90’s?”

He sighed. Glasses fogged. “If one more person asks me that, I’m going to lose it. No, I was not _married to Brock,_ don’t you think you’d know if I were married?”

“I thought it was the unofficial kind of married. Like how gay people do. Because it’s illegal.”

“I don’t know where you and your brother get these ideas. Have you been talking to Orpheus?”

“But Brock was like, our dad. And _you’re_ our dad. And he lived here.”

“He lived in the basement!” 

“He took care of us every day! And you were always together.” He slurped the dregs of his juice pouch noisily. “I don’t believe you. Dean says you’re afraid to shine your inner light.”

“Brock looks like two Tom Sellecks slammed together and I’m honoured that you boys think he’s in my league to the point that we were _married_ , but you’re still wrong.”

“I didn’t say he was in your league, I said I thought you were married. You were the rich old guy punching above your weight.”

“You’re walking on thin ice, mister.”

“You’re the one who got divorced and screwed up our entire family!”

“I wasn’t married, Hank! For crying out loud.” He sat back and kicked out his legs. “Brock was our bodyguard. He was paid to be here, capisce? It was a job. Why are you both acting like you don’t know what a bodyguard is?”

Hank shrunk back. “But we’re a family.”

“No, we’re three sad, little men who paid a bigger sad man to make sure we didn’t get ourselves killed. We have gotten a new man—who is also sad—to make sure we keep not getting killed. I will not marry the new man either. Do you understand?”

Hank looked genuinely crushed. Up until that moment, he hadn’t considered that the boys’ mistake about him and Brock meant anything to them, but maybe it did. Not that there was anything he could have done about it if he’d known. He turned back to the telescope and stooped to press his eye to it, and the Andromeda galaxy swiveled into view, a light-ish smudge against the inky black. Only if he didn’t look directly at it. 

“I’d get him back if I could,” he said stiffly. “It’s not up to me.”

The patio door creaked and he wasn’t sure if Hank heard him before he went back inside.

—

For the first time in a long time, Doc dreamed.

Rusty was alone in the basement of the house Colonel Gentleman had lived in in 1972 and he could hear a party going on upstairs, laughter, women’s delighted squeals, jazz music, a strange, rhythmic thumping. The basement was covered in gold shag carpet and the walls were lined with shelves holding trinkets and vessels, ancient vases and statues of men and women twisted in lascivious positions, and the light was yellow and low.

Footsteps thundered down the stairs louder than anything he’d ever heard, and Brock appeared at the foot of them heaving, hunched, buck naked and dripping in scarlet blood, his eyes wild. When he spoke, it sounded far away and tinny like through a bad connection.

_“Shall I compare thee to a summer chaos spread out against the teaming lands and the thorned fields with the old sublime prophets wringing lilies from the acorn—”_

Nonsense words. Poetry? He advanced slowly, dripping red on the carpet, unblinking, and Rusty scrambled back against the coffee table to get away.

_“Will you lift your head in wonder at the naked generations, at the sick men making magic with their humble tools and their chance at the yellow smoke, at the window panes—”_

His voice sounded like he was underwater. The coffee table was glass and when Rusty put his foot against it he fell through, and there was a crash but no pain, no blood.

“Rusty?” Someone called from upstairs, a woman’s voice hardly heard down the stairwell and over the music. “Are you alright?”

_“—at the weak men making magic out of something underneath the self-same sky—”_

Brock pulled him out of the broken table like he weighed nothing. His hands were slippery with blood. He dragged him close and his body was hot like he was on fire; he grabbed his ass and it knocked the air out of his lungs. When he tried to speak it was like someone was sitting on his chest.

“Why did you—”

_“For I am sick of love—”_

Brock smelled like burning garbage, like sulphur, like hell, and he could feel him half hard against his thigh. He dropped his head against his shoulder, too tired to keep it up, and let him hold him.

“Are you coming back?”

_“Will you run after me—”_

He turned his head. Brock had his father’s face now, leathery old suntanned skin, bleached teeth and cheek fillers, and he spoke in his voice.

_“Your love better than wine—”_

Doc woke in bed to sweat-wet sheets, his heart racing. He groped on his nightstand for paper to write down Brock’s words in case they were some kind of cryptic code, but he couldn’t find any, and by that time he’d forgotten.

—

He dreamt about Brock again next night, more physical, with fewer words. He woke up aching and shoved one hand into his briefs and closed the other around his throat. He couldn’t get the kind of pressure he wanted on his windpipe but it was easy enough to imagine a bigger hand, stronger, and calloused skin. It got the job done.

—

He was almost, _almost_ unsurprised to find that Brock had been on the compound the whole time, holed up in the old lab. To open the doors, battle the initial stomach-drop of the unexpected hubbub, and then instantly search for Brock’s hulking frame was… telling. He felt like an idiot.

“Doc,” Brock said, surprised. Hearing it gave Doc a zing of fear and thrill down his spine and a year of talking about him became instantly humiliating in retrospect; it was one thing to idly and unwillingly imagine something and another thing to see someone and _know._ The dreams hadn’t helped.

“Brock!” He felt like an idiot. “Brock.”

There was an unwelcome pang of possessiveness, a bratty sense of _that’s mine, give it back_ that made him sick. He looked the same as he remembered, maybe a little more run down; tired blue eyes that were more familiar to him than his own, face like a busted Greek statue, stooped shoulders. So big he took up all the space in a room. He hadn’t noticed him age day over day for the past twenty years, but seeing him then after even a short absence, it was obvious. They were both getting old.

—

He had no idea what time it was; he’d taken one too many oxy, not enough to be dangerous, just enough that he couldn’t feel his face. He was halfway through his second negroni on top of that, which made his fingers buzz pleasantly. It was nice. It was a good night. A Saturday, as if weekends meant anything to him.

He recognized Brock’s shape as soon as he appeared around the hall corner. His eyes flicked to him and away. He was wearing his civvies—tight black shirt, tight jeans, not his ridiculous S.P.H.I.N.X. getup.

“You don’t live here anymore,” Doc reminded him, not taking his eyes off the screen. “I don’t want you retconning the boys again, Hank called Dean ‘Garrett’ the other day and I don’t think he was joking.”

Brock said, “They’re asleep,” and it wasn’t weird that he knew. He leaned in the doorway. “Whatcha watching?”

“ _Double Impact_.”

“Why?”

“It was on. You don’t like Van Damme?”

“I’ve seen better.”

Doc clicked his tongue. He refused to grovel about it, he wouldn’t welcome him back.

“There’s a box of your stuff in the panic room, if that’s what you’re looking for. Records and clothes and what have you.”

“Nah,” Brock said quietly, wandering into the room. “I didn’t wanna ask in front of everyone, but how are the boys doing?”

“You’ve seen them, how do you think?” Doc snorted. “You left me to deal with two newly-mortal teenagers with depression. By myself! I’m not equipped to handle that.”

“They weren’t in any danger, I would have—”

Doc took his eyes off the screen, whirling to face him. “Who gives a shit about danger? They _miss_ you! They’ve been fucking insufferable about it!”

He wasn’t stupid enough to ask whether he missed them. Until now, he’d been unwilling to think of himself as a freshly single parent, but that’s what it felt like: where there were two, there were now one. He had no right to be mad, but he was.

Brock said, “I’m not gonna apologize, Doc. I’m doing what has to be done. And I’m still watching out for you.”

“We _have_ a bodyguard! If I wanted another, I’d pay one!” Before Doc could think better about it, he hissed, “They think we were sleeping together! They think you _left me!”_

Brock stood up straight. He looked profoundly uncomfortable, which was a strange look on a guy who never looked much like anything.

“Oh my God,” he gurgled.

“Do you have any idea how fucking sad that is? Being an _involuntary divorcee_?”

“There—there’s no way, they must have been—”

“Oh, please! Orpheus thought so, too, can you blame them? You played _mommy_ to my kids for twenty years without once thinking of the unsavoury implications of that?”

Brock winced. “No.”

“God, you’re naive when you want to be.” He jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “We’re pathetic.”

Brock said nothing. Certainly not arguing. His footsteps muffled on the carpet and the couch sagged as he sat on the far end.

“You’ve had one hell of a year,” he said eventually. Doc laughed thinly and took his hands off his face.

“It’s been awful. I’ve never been so bored and stressed at the same time. What’s the code to the safe?”

“Your dad’s birthday.”

“And who did you get to clean, is there like a number or something I call?”

“I did it.”

“You cleaned? Like the floor?”

“Yes, Doc.”

“Was that in your job description?”

“Well, _you_ weren’t doing it.”

That pang of possessiveness and loss hit him again, even through the sedative fog. He was a shitty father _and_ an involuntary divorcee. There was a chance he couldn’t even do this without Brock which, for the first time, scared him a little. There was a long silence and Brock didn’t leave. He seemed to be watching the movie, the plot of which Doc had long since lost.

“You really never thought about how it looks?” Doc asked the screen, refusing to look at him when he said it. “You and me.”

He caught a shrug from Brock. “I mean… not _no._ ”

“What?”

“I don’t wanna talk about this.”

“Too bad! What do you mean, _not no?”_

“I mean it… crossed my mind.”

Brock talked infuriatingly slow. Getting anything out of him was like pulling teeth.

“What does _that_ mean?”

Brock rubbed the back of his neck, more awkward than he had seen him in a long time. “I thought that’s what you were going for, a few years back. There was a while there where you’d, uh… watch me wash my car, and we’d drink a lot and watch TV. I don’t know if you remember.”

He did remember. He didn’t know whether it was a conscious effort on his part or unintentional spillover longing, but he remembered the drinking and watching TV. It was the most they’d ever talked. He put his hand on Brock’s knee once and he didn’t remember him pulling away. They listened to _Zeppelin II._

“And I figured I should think about it, just in case,” Brock went on, “back whenever that was. And it wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world to… once in a while. If you wanted.”

“Oh.”

“But not now, Doc. It’s too…”

“Yeah.”

He looked away. “Sorry.”

Doc sucked his teeth. “Don’t _pity_ me, Christ. You of all people.”

“I don’t pity you.”

“Everyone pities me, Brock.”

His failure made people uncomfortable, he saw it every day. A tightness in the eyes, a curl of the lip: _if I’d been handed all that, I wouldn’t have fucked it up. Not that bad._ His body looked about as bad as a human body could look. His voice sounded like what locking your keys in your car felt like. He was a walking cautionary tale. That he had come anywhere near the passion-void act Brock was talking about—a charity handjob, a drunken fuck—was unimaginable, closer than he ever thought he’d get to real intimacy those days. And Brock _knew him_ , too.

“I don’t… want that,” he said. It came out halting and unconvincing. “For the record.”

“Sure.”

“You don’t believe me?”

Their eyes met. Something horrible and raw went right through him like Brock already knew, had always known. He was polite to say it had started recently or to feign uncertainty. Doc wondered himself how long it had been. He spent so much time not thinking about it.

Brock scratched idly at something on his chest and looked away. Not quite smiling. “I believe you,” he said. He didn’t. 

Doc wanted to leave it. Maybe Brock would watch the rest of the movie with him and it would be normal and the first step towards becoming real, regular friends. But he didn’t leave it.

“But—why would _you_? Theoretically. With me.” He was too desperate for any scraps of attention to dread the truth. “I know I look like shit. I’m _old_ now. Why would that have been…”

He trailed off. Brock looked like he was considering it, brow furrowed. 

“I didn’t think of it like that.” He cracked his neck and it sounded like someone rolling a set of dice. “Don’t sell yourself short, Doc, you’re… what’s the word. Charismatic.”

“You don’t _fuck_ charismatic.”

“Sometimes you do.” Brock shrugged. “It’s complicated. You’re…”

“If one more person tells me we’re a family—”

“Well, we are.”

“So? What if I accomplished something on my own for once, family-related merits aside?”

“You’ll get there someday,” he chuckled.

After a moment, he slid off the arm of the couch to sit next to Doc, eyes on the screen. Doc sipped his drink and the ice clinking in the glass was the loudest thing in the world. Slowly, Brock reached out into the space between them and closed his hand around the back of his neck. He started to rub his thumb back and forth across the base of his skull.

“Wh—”

Brock went, “Shh.”

Doc closed his eyes. His skin was hard and smooth and warm and his grip was strong. He hadn’t realized how touch-starved he was, and he knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“It’s complicated,” Brock said again, quiet.

“You said that already.”

“Hm.”

He dug his thumb into a knot of tension and it melted away; it was intimate and weird and wonderful, and his hand was so big he could have circled his fingers all the way around his neck. Doc wondered what else he could get away with—what Brock would let him get away with. What he’d do if he took that hand and held it and put it between his legs. He knew he’d be met with awkward, quiet disapproval, but God did he like to think about it.

“Don’t tell anyone we had this conversation,” Brock said. “Not to be rude or whatever.”

“Everyone already thinks we’ve been dating for twenty years.”

“Well, humour me.”

“Why don’t you wipe my memory, secret agent man?”

“I don’t need you to forget.” The hand slid from the back of his neck and squeezed his shoulder amiably. Then his hand was gone and he missed it. “You oughta get out more, Doc.”

He thought he’d get a ‘you don’t want a guy like me’ speech, but it didn’t come. They both knew neither of them wanted a guy like either of them.

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Doc said. “When was the last time _you_ went on a date?”

“I’m not interested in that stuff.” 

“What, and I am?”

“I just mean like, where do you _see_ yourself when you’re sixty? Here?”

“Dying alone in Dean’s future ex-wife’s basement, pickled young by years of heroin use. If I’m lucky. If I’m not, the boys’ll stick me in a home.”

“Doc.”

“Well, I don’t know. Where will you be?”

“Probably dead.”

“So you get to die and I don’t? That’s thoughtless.” He threw back the rest of his drink. He could hardly taste it. “You should go. Hank’s been getting up every hour these days, he’ll see you.”

“Fair ‘nuff.” Brock rose with his eerie stillness, the way he had of moving. He headed out the way he’d came. “Take it easy, Doc. I’ll be around.”

Doc was too high to tell whether he was reading into all of this or if it was real, or even if he’d remember it the next day. Whether it felt like a beginning or an end, or nothing at all. He’d be around. There was time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the dream-speak is from a poem called Morphing by Gregory Betts.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You wouldn’t get it, Mol, he’s—he’s_ home _. It’s not anything else.”_
> 
> _She scoffed. “I have heard of this ‘home.’ I think most people don’t fuck their shoe racks.”_

After The Conversation, there was tension. That’s what Brock called it, _minor tension,_ the kind of thing where you avoid being alone together if you can help it, but nothing more. He’d catch Doc watching him like he used to. He ignored it, and Doc didn’t bring it up again. Then all of a sudden they were in New York and things were better. Doc had gotten a little better since the move; ironic that once he had the money to pay for the pills, he didn’t want them so much. Brock had seen money fix a lot of things, which no one liked to admit. Doc’s habits slid a little further out of ‘coping mechanism’ and towards ‘recreational,’ which was nice to see.

No one needed to hear that they were better when they were high than when they were sober, but Doc was, so Brock just didn’t say it. Amphetamines made him confident and he was so much easier to be around when he didn’t actively want to kill himself. Brock didn’t feel bad about thinking it, because it was just a fact. Doc was a handful at best. He was a functional drug addict and only a passable human being. Brock knew these things like he knew that Hank had blond hair and that Dean was growing into a very Venture brand of daddy issues despite his best efforts. A series of facts. It was useless to think about whether the drinking and drugs made Doc into someone he wasn’t or just cleared out the clutter enough to let him be himself. Brock couldn’t think of a good metaphor, but it was whatever you called it when two things were so indistinguishable that it wasn’t worth separating them.

Life in the tower was slow again. Dean moved out, Hank started working and a new cast of crazies buzzed around them like flies, but it reminded him of how things used to be. He listened to records and watched TV. He lived quietly and watched Doc start his glitzy new life.

He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t excited when Gathers told him they had to meet up. He was glad in his own way to be back with the Ventures, but most days, it was far from thrilling. He met Gathers and Shore Leave in one of Ven-Tech’s many unused, sterile meeting rooms, barely big enough for the three of them. Shore Leave threw his hands in the air.

“Dwayne ‘The Brock’ Johnson, it has been a _lifetime!_ How are things in the ivory tower?”

“Good, good.” Brock slapped him on the back as they sat around the cramped table. Gathers held an officially-stamped OSI file folder, which he slapped down on the table. “What brings you guys to this neck of the woods?”

Gathers leaned back in his chair. “It’s not about you this time. We need to borrow your Daddy Warbucks for a mission. It’s up to you to get him to say yes.”

It took him a second. “Doc?”

“Trust me, I’m as surprised as you are. Your secret, secondary mission is to not let it go to his head.”

“Easier said than done. What’s going on?”

Gathers slid a picture out of the envelope and across the table. It was a photo of a not-unattractive woman in her early forties, with dark, curly hair and a nice mouth, clearly taken from afar with a telephoto lens. She was crossing the street and holding a cup of coffee. She had tattoos on her arms, just visible past the cuff of her jacket.

“Kate Westphal,” Gathers said, “a new villain on the scene here. Her schtick is a kind of mad scientist, geneticist, pharmacist thing. Incoherent design, if you ask me. Calls herself ‘Overdose.’”

“And she’s a _serial killer_ ,” Shore Leave added, wagging his fingers for dramatic effect like he was telling a ghost story. Brock took her file from Gathers and started to rifle through it.

“You don’t hear that much in this line of work.”

“It’s complicated. You kill a bunch of people in street clothes, you get arrested, but you do it while wearing tights and somehow it’s your job? Don’t think too hard about it, but this one’s a gray area.”

Brock read her file. Perfectly healthy villains and heroes were dropping dead of heart attacks, and the OSI managed to place a handful of them near Kate before they died. Top contenders were some kind of secret lethal injection; a substance, a spore, something targeted and, so far, undetectable. No real motive established yet, but her dad had reportedly died while working as a lab assistant to some hotshot villain back in the day, before the Guild was officially _out_. She seemed somewhat indiscriminate about the killing—two secretaries and one security guard had heart attacks along with her supposed targets.

“Why isn’t the Guild intervening?” Brock asked. “That kind of straight up murdering has gotta be against… something.”

“Because they say she’s not doing it. She doesn’t _have_ an arch. They don’t know how she’s doing it and haven’t pinned it on her. We haven’t been able to get anything other than circumstantial evidence.”

“So you need to get your hands on whatever it is she’s using to kill these guys.”

“Right. Matching chemical makeup, autopsies, that whole song and dance. Or we present enough evidence to the Guild and make them do it.”

“Fair enough.” Brock handed the file back. “So what’s Doc got to do with it?”

Shore Leave rifled through the folder and produced another surveillance photo of the woman. She was sitting at a café table with her legs crossed, and visible at the top of her thigh in a cluster of small tattoos was a little Rusty Venture cartoon head.

“She’s a fan,” Shore Leave said.

Brock scoffed. “That’s a pretty weak connection. Nerds get tattoos of any old shit they used to like, have you seen that guy with Jar Jar Binks on his back?”

“It’s still something. If things go south, she might not kill the guy from the cartoon she likes, but the rest of us would be in trouble. Seems like she’s playing it fast and loose with who she’s letting die. And it’s hard to punch a neurotoxin.”

“So you want him to… ask her out?”

“You got it. The easiest way to get into someone’s house? Fuck ‘em. That’s a tried and true move.”

Brock squinted. “I don’t know how far his fame carries him these days. I mean… he doesn’t look like the cartoon.”

“He looks like yesterday’s morning shit, but it’s worth a shot.”

“We couldn’t just send in a cleaning lady?”

“She doesn’t have one. Runs a tight ship. We even tried the ‘emergency fire inspector’ bit—no dice. She followed our man around the whole time. A goddamn hawk.”

Shore Leave sighed. “We’re assuming she keeps the stuff hidden, or in some kind of safe. If it _is_ in a safe, we need to see the thing, then get, say, twenty mins to code break it. _If_ she’s keeping the stuff in a safe. If she’s not, we’ll need some more snooping. It’s a lengthy procedure.”

“And you think Doc can handle it?”

“No,” Gathers said, palms up, “but from what we’ve heard from the guy we got trailing her, she likes ‘em little. Not into that prime OSI man meat.”

Brock looked at her photo again. “She looks…”

Gathers scoffed. “Too hot to have such shit taste? My thoughts exactly, but we work with what we’re given.”

“In her defense, there’s something nice about a little guy,” Shore Leave said. “They’re grateful, you know? And compact. And besides, he doesn’t _have_ to get with her. They could talk about antiques for all we care, he just needs to get invited back for a drink.”

Brock didn’t want to spoil their fun by reminding them of how transcendently awful Doc was on dates. He didn’t think he’d last long enough for a drink, even if he did miraculously get invited back from the bar.

“Can we do the thing where we’ve got a little mic in his ear?” he asked. “Doc is, uh… pretty bad with women. Might need some pointers to take it home.”

Shore Leave clapped his hands. “Oh, it’s like a rom com, I love it. Yes. This one’s gonna be fun.”

—

Doc took zero convincing.

“You need ol’ Rusty to put the moves on her, ‘eh? Well, I’m a little _rusty_ —ha ha—but I’ve still got a way with the, ah, fairer sex.”

Brock winced. “Great. We’ve got an info packet you can read, we’ll go over the whole thing.”

“Is she dangerous?”

“Uh…”

Doc rolled his eyes. “Right. Time for Rusty to get tied to a chair again.”

“You just gotta take her out, Doc. You get invited back to her place and do some snooping, or distract her while we snoop. You got this.”

They were in the kitchen, in the morning before anyone else was up. Doc was drinking some horrible meal replacement. Brock stood and cleared his dishes away.

“Wait,” Doc said to his retreating back. “Are you going to watch me have sex?”

They spent a terrible lifetime in that moment together.

“We’ll… be busy,” Brock said finally. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Doc made a face like he continued to worry about it. Brock left the room.

—

They orchestrated Doc running into Kate on the subway and, surprising every agent watching carefully from behind newspapers and cellphones, she liked him. She recognized him. She was half a head taller than him and much better dressed and the contrast was staggering. On request and suppressing his natural tendencies, Doc was perfectly pleasant to her, and they made plans to go for a drink. 

They outfitted him with an undetectable short-range ear piece for the date and a lapel camera on his jacket, with specific instructions to arrange his jacket with the camera facing out if he took it off. They even practiced. Brock was stationed in a van across the street from the bar where he could communicate with the ear piece, and the others were at OSI HQ where they had access to whatever they needed to crack the safe’s code, _if_ it worked and _if_ there was a safe. The surveillance van had all the space of a converted minivan and smelled like old socks, but it got the job done.

_“—So he hands me these cables and tells me to jump the Jeep. Using the X-1! I’d never jumped a car in my life, I was NINE, let alone using an experimental supersonic jet! Where would you even put the clamps? And then he gets FURIOUS when I don’t do it!”_

“Cool it with the dad talk, Doc,” Brock said into his ear. He’d been watching Kate’s on-screen face oscillate between horrified and bored for five minutes. “I know she’s got daddy issues, but don’t showcase yours. Ask her about herself.”

 _“Uh, but—”_ Doc started, pivoting almost smoothly, “— _he’s dead and I’m not, so, what are you gonna do. You said you were reading Heinlein?”_

 _“Nice one, Samson,”_ Gathers said over the connection to HQ. _“You never struck me as being GOOD with women. Just, you know. WITH women.”_

 _“Oh, he’s a real casanova. You should see him when he gets going.”_ That was Shore Leave. Having both of their voices in his head, plus watching Doc, was like being on a chaotic conference call. _“Good call doing the ‘one line’ to Rusty, Brock. It’s funnier if we can talk about him.”_

 _“It’s why you’re out there and we’re in here,”_ Gathers said. _“You couldn’t pay me to get back in that goddamn van.”_

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Brock said, watching through the lapel camera as Kate started to smile again. He could hear in Doc’s voice that he was just being polite as he listened to her talk, and before tonight he would have said he didn’t have it in him. Doc was too selfish to humour anyone.

 _“—I’ve got this giant collection of all his short stories,”_ Kate was saying, _“I’ve got a whole bookshelf that’s just him and Asimov, it’s—”_

Brock flipped the switch that let him talk to Doc.

“This is your _in_ , she mentioned her place. Say something about—about how it’s cool and you want to see it or whatever.”

Shore Leave said, _“Smooth.”_

—

Brock parked the van around the corner from Kate’s place, one of those upsettingly modern homes that looked like a rec centre, all bare concrete and wood slats. He watched on the screen as she led Doc through the house.

 _“It’s weird to see the guy happy,”_ Shore Leave said, _“and sad. Because it makes you wonder how rarely he’s been happy.”_

Brock didn’t think Doc was that happy about the date, but it wasn’t worth saying. He’d never known anyone so simultaneously desperate and judgmental, Doc would invent something he didn’t like about her. She seemed fine enough to him, but Doc would find something.

 _“Ah, I’ll leave my jacket on,”_ he was saying to her, _“I run cold.”_

Gathers hummed. _“We should’ve fitted him with a second camera.”_

“Hindsight 20/20. He knows the drill.”

_“Eyes peeled for anything that could hold doses of a lethal injection, boys.”_

“Remember,” Brock said to Doc, “you’re looking for a safe or container, or something that could hold the doses. Go through her medicine cabinet, anything you can get your hands on.”

Shore Leave said, _“This place is spartan. I’m getting a dominatrix aura.”_

“No way.”

_“I’m never wrong.”_

Her apartment was all white and black and chrome, books and twisty art sculptures made of stone. She made them drinks and they talked about something, Brock wasn’t listening, just scanning the room.

“Keep moving,” Brock told Doc, “like you’re looking around. We need to see everything.”

Doc wandered obligingly. If Kate thought he was being weird, she didn’t look it. After their second drink, Doc excused himself to the bathroom and dug through her medicine cabinet.

 _“God,”_ he said, whispering as quietly as he could, _“if these are all hers, she’s worse than me. You could kill a horse with this shit.”_

“Run all the labels in front of the camera, we can look ‘em up later. Maybe they’re involved.”

_“Or maybe she’s a lush.”_

Shore Leave said, _“Then they’re perfect for each other! Tell him we need to see the bedroom!”_

“We need the bedroom next, Doc. People hide all kinds of stuff in there.”

_“What do I DO?”_

“Just—spend time in there.” Brock grimaced at himself. “Just whatever you want, we’ll see when we’re there. Make sure your camera faces out.”

_“You think—”_

“She’s into you, Doc, don’t fuck this up.”

He left the bathroom. Kate was arranged very precisely on a chaise lounge with the fancy cocktail she’d made them earlier balanced on her knee. Doc sat next to her, close; they could only see the lower half of her face. She leaned in and kissed him.

 _“Jackpot!”_ Shore Leave crowed. _“Is it weird that I’m having fun with this? Is that bad?”_

“Yes.”

_“Did you ever play The Sims?”_

_“Pay attention!”_ Gathers snapped, _“Bedroom!”_

They had stumbled into the bedroom. Mostly they just saw the front of Kate’s shirt.

He said to Doc, “Get your jacket off, put it over something. Is there a chair?”

Doc fumbled with his jacket. The camera tipped and swung as he got it off and steadied as he arranged it a little too carefully wherever he’d put it. His face swum into view and disappeared. Kate pushed him onto the bed. The camera caught half the bed and the rest of her small bedroom; there was a chair covered in clothes, the doorway to an ensuite bathroom, and a dresser cluttered with pictures and junk.

Shore Leave went _, “Ding ding ding ding!”_

“Where?”

_“On the dresser, the little safe. That’s gotta be it.”_

Brock squinted at the screen.

 _“It’s refrigerated,”_ Gathers said, _“that’s it. Zoom in, get a look at that model number. It’s a Hartmann Tresore.”_

_“On it.”_

_“Brock, tell him.”_

“Doc, it’s the safe on the dresser. We’re on it.”

Doc was uninterested. He was trying to get Kate’s bra off. Brock heard the furious clicking of keys on the OSI end, Gathers barking orders away from the terminal. In the van, he had nothing to do. He looked around, surveying the cramped space. He adjusted his headset. He glanced at the screen, then away. Then back. Against his better judgement, he watched. Kate had a nice body, soft, with big, heavy tits. He couldn’t make out what her tattoos were, but they looked good.

He was hard, but that was less embarrassing than it would have been if anyone were around to see it. He shifted uncomfortably in the van’s shitty plastic swivel seat. 

_“We’ve got the make,”_ Gathers said in his ear. _“Hartmann Tresore churned these out in the early 2000s with a Godawful web-based login client, her passcode’s somewhere on the cloud. If we get enough time, the little guy can open it when he leaves.”_

Brock didn’t bother telling Doc. He could just make out the shapes of their bodies in the dark, the room lit only by the light in the hall. Kate was on top of him. The sound of their mouths was loud through the mic. He knew Doc had sex in a purely theoretical way, like a fact that he’d heard once and believed because he had no reason not to, but that held no real meaning. Thinking about it any more than that felt like going off the deep end. _Seeing_ it was something else entirely. He couldn’t tell what he was doing. Kate sounded like she liked it.

 _“Samson!”_ Gathers.

“What?”

_“I said, don’t let him leave ‘til we’ve got that code. We’re not going back in there.”_

Shore Leave laughed. _“I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”_

They went quiet with their work at HQ and Brock was left in the horrible space of half-watching a friend have sex. He couldn’t turn off the screen, he was here to protect him if anything went wrong, but nothing was going wrong. And he was still hard, which he wasn’t going to think about.

Kate’s voice, breathless.

 _“I’ve been told I come on a little strong, but—if you’re interested—”_ There was the jingling of metal. Something she was holding just out of frame.

Shore Leave was suddenly back. _“Oh, come on, show us! Show us!”_

She moved back a little towards the camera. It was a strap-on harness.

Shore Leave whispered reverently, _“I TOLD you.”_

Doc froze, stuttering around an answer. Even in the low resolution, Brock could see him look directly into the camera on his jacket.

For obvious reasons, Brock was reminded of The Conversation.

He flipped the switch to talk to him.

“Don’t look at me!” he hissed. “Say something, answer her!”

_“I—I don’t—”_

He was going crazy. He’d been stuck in the van for hours and his head was aching and he was dehydrated and horny, mixed up, bored. Without thinking about it, he cut the connection to headquarters. They couldn’t see or hear Doc or him anymore.

“It’s just you and me, Doc,” he said quietly, his voice crackling in his own ears. “Do it.”

He heard Doc take a sharp breath. _“I—”_

He didn’t know if that was for her or him. Gathers would gut him for this. He didn’t know why he did it; some misguided protectiveness, a hair trigger. The simple thought of ‘I wouldn’t want anyone to see _me_ getting pegged.’ His hand hovered over the cord that would reconnect them to HQ and he didn’t pick it up. He stared at the screen.

Doc pulled Kate into a kiss. Brock heard her voice, staticky and soft.

_“Have you done this before?”_

Silence, shuffling. Then Doc, louder.

_“Yeah.”_

Brock had his hand between his legs. He pulled his belt free. He watched the whole thing.

—

There was some issue with the cabling and after pulling the plug on the connection to HQ, Brock couldn’t get it to start again. Doc had to leave the house without breaking into the safe. Gathers yelled at Brock for an hour and Brock just sat there, grinding his teeth and apologizing as sparingly as possible.

When he got back to the apartment it was almost the middle of the night, quiet and dark. He crept upstairs, dead tired and eager to go to sleep and forget the whole thing.

“Brock.”

He turned. Doc hovered in the dark doorway to his bedroom.

“Not now, Doc.”

It was hard to look at him. He couldn’t believe he wanted to talk when pretending it didn’t happen would have been so, so easy.

“You said that before,” Doc said carefully. “ _Not now_.”

“Did I?”

“When we talked. Whenever that was.”

The Conversation. “Right.”

“So, then what’s… now?”

“Now?”

“Yeah.” Doc leaned on the door frame. “You’re around again. You walk around in your underwear. We have breakfast together.”

It was pathetic that he could feel cornered by someone who was, himself, so pathetic.

“I like spending time with the boys,” he said.

“And me?”

“You’re... there.”

“You know my schedule. We’re always together.”

“I’m your bodyguard.”

“You know how I take my coffee.”

“You make sure _everyone_ knows that.”

He knew what Doc was getting at and refused to acknowledge it. He tapped his fingers on the metal plate in his chest to hear it go _tok tok tok_ through his shirt, a new habit. 

“We’re living together,” Doc stressed, “like it used to be. I mean—I think it’s _less_ complicated. Than it used to be. Dean’s out of the house, and Hank’s never home.”

“It’s…”

“Intimate,” Doc finished. Not what he was going to say but also, unfortunately, not wrong. Everything became unwillingly intimate when you’d known someone for so long. 

“Intimate,” Brock said back.

It took him a second to figure out why his hands felt weird. His palms were sweating. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten clammy hands.

“With Kate,” Doc said, haltingly, “were… did you…”

Brock said nothing. His head was pounding.

Doc waited an appropriate amount of time, then said, “I heard you. You didn’t turn the… the mic thing off.”

‘Mortified’ didn’t even begin to cover it. He wanted to shoot himself in the head. This kind of thing didn’t happen to him. He did this to other people.

“I didn’t…”

He trailed off. Doc raised his eyebrows at him.

“Okay.”

The embarrassment was excruciating. This didn’t happen to him.

He tried, “You’re doing good now, Doc, you don’t need this.” It came out almost pleading, trying to un-convince someone of something you both refused to talk about. He didn’t know why he wasn’t just saying _no_. The same reason he wouldn’t have said no two years ago if Doc had asked. That _something_ that made him let Doc push him around for twenty-plus years, some hyper-specific cocktail of pity and affection and familiarity that had rotted his brain. Doc was standing closer now. Hovering. Rambling.

“Don’t get me wrong. I… I know I’m not a _catch_. I’m not an idiot. And you’re…” He stopped. He rubbed his neck. Brock’s palms continued to sweat. “I think I inspire a sort of morbid curiosity. Like... rubbernecking a car crash.”

After a moment’s hesitation, he ran his hands up Brock’s chest and took a shuddery breath. 

Doc built a life around lying to himself perfectly. Brock had always hoped he wouldn’t be around when it all came apart, but he wondered what it would be like. This was it. He hadn’t expected it to be so quiet. Doc looked fatally small, standing in front of him; wrists like hollow chicken bones, arms like the sinew of a dog’s leg. He smelled bitter and sharp like Campari. He stuttered when he spoke again, his hands smoothing out Brock’s shirt.

“Would you—still—”

Brock didn’t like to stall. He didn’t like inevitabilities. He grabbed Doc’s arm.

“Take your clothes off.”

He shoved him into the room and kicked the door shut behind them, and they fumbled around in the dark like a couple of embarrassed teenagers. He wasn’t thinking. They didn’t kiss. When they were naked, Doc gurgled, _God, you walk around with that thing?_ and other than that they didn’t say anything. He’d never heard him so quiet; to be something he focused on more than the sound of his own voice was unsettling. The bottle of lube that was pressed into his hands looked like it had seen a different century, but it worked okay.

He pushed him face down on the bed, he couldn’t look at him. Doc didn’t seem to mind and he knew somehow that he wouldn’t, not after a lifetime of being kidnapped and gagged and bound. It was one of the thousand stupid things he knew about him through so many years of osmosis and oversharing, without knowing exactly how or when he learned. Doc took his hand and put it on the back of his own neck. Brock closed his fingers around him and shoved him into the bed and fucked him, squeezed his eyes shut, breathed hard. He felt sick and dizzy, chest tight like he was drowning, regret banging around in his head in a ‘left the faucet on’ kind of way, pleasure aching and distant like it was happening to someone else. He was taking too long. He was sweating. The bed was too quiet like how rich people’s beds always were and when he came he groaned and it was the loudest sound in the room.

When Doc pushed up on his elbows he hit his head on his metal chest plate and gave a quiet _ow._ He pulled out and he went _ow_ again. Doc was already finished. He hadn’t noticed. He sat on the bed and looked down at his hands. Doc tugged a corner of his ostentatious white duvet over himself, like he had anything to be embarrassed about anymore, and lay on his back breathing up at the ceiling. The bed was so big that they weren’t anywhere near each other and Brock lay down, his brain a buzzing chamber of half-thoughts and sounds and surprise that the ceiling in the bedroom was so high, he’d never looked up before. His eyes started to sting and he realized he hadn’t blinked in over a minute.

“Don’t quote me on this,” Doc said to the ceiling, “but there’s something delicious about getting sodomized in my dead brother’s bed. He’d hate it.”

“He would,” Brock agreed. He took his first breath in a while. He reached over the side of the bed and groped for his jeans in the dark, looking for his smokes. He found them, lay back and tapped one out into his palm.

Doc said, “Ah, can you go on the balcony?”

“Still?”

“Wh—you think I bend house rules if you _sleep with me?”_

“Yes?” Brock sighed and sat up. “It’s cool, I should… go… anyways.”

“Wait.” Doc huffed. “It’s fine. Stay. For a bit.”

Brock settled back into the pillows and lit his smoke. It was fine for a minute, but he started thinking too much. He tried hard not to live with regret, and had tried for so long that he hardly had to think about it anymore, but then, some regret loomed. This was big. He saw a future where Doc followed him around like a puppy and tried to tie him down, told the boys, or told _anyone_. A grave misunderstanding of… whatever it was they’d done. 

He tried to focus on the luxury of getting to smoke inside the house. And how Doc’s bed was much nicer than his.

“I’m getting a new mattress,” he said into the empty air. “If that’s okay.”

“You don’t have to ask me, you live here.”

“Yeah, but it’s your house. Do you need the old mattress for anything?”

“Get Hatred to take it to the dump.” Doc didn’t say anything else. Brock could see him watching him out of the corner of his eye and didn’t look back. “You’re, uh, taking this well.”

Brock shrugged. He blew a smoke ring and watched it float away.

“You’ve had a crush on me for twenty years, Doc. Not to rub your nose in it, but it’s not _news_.”

Doc groaned and put his hands over his face. “We’re not having this conversation.”

“You started it.”

“You were there, too!” Doc sputtered. “ _You’re_ the news! Don’t act like you—that wasn’t a fucking _handshake_ , tough guy! You don’t get to make fun of me!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Brock laughed. He ran a hand through his hair. “This is fucked up.”

“You’re telling me.”

He looked over at him. He looked like someone else without his glasses, more like Jonas, but not necessarily in a good way. The glasses filled out his face in a way he needed and he looked young and sad without them.

“So. Are we…” Doc started and then lost his way, grimacing at himself, awkward. “...good?”

Brock laughed again. He dropped his smoke into a water glass on the nightstand and stood, cracking his back. He toe-hooked his jeans into his hands and pulled them on. Doc was the still point of his turning world. He didn’t exactly trust him, but he knew for certain that he understood him. Doc hadn’t surprised him in a very, very long time.

“We’re good. Go to sleep.”

—

Mostly, not much was different. To his surprise, Doc didn’t start to follow him around; he was either busy or trying to look busy, and when he wasn’t, it’s not like he wanted to watch football with him. Brock slept with women when he had the opportunity, he just didn’t bring them home, which seemed polite enough. Doc didn’t ask about it or seem to care, and he didn’t know if he ever saw Kate again.

When he wanted to, all Brock had to do was go wherever Doc was and say, “You busy?” then watch as his pupils dilated like a camera lens and he scrambled to become un-busy. They went to the few places in the apartment where the security footage wasn’t streamed without a passcode or active alarm; the panic room, the bathrooms. He’d fuck him standing and avoid his own gaze in the bathroom mirror, feeling him breathe wetly into the front of his shirt, and it was—fine. Good, maybe, or in any case, he got used to it. Doing what he did with Doc fed some of his worst tendencies; laziness, ennui and worst, his sick desire to be _needed,_ which he didn’t let himself think about much. He was dumb and human and to feel like a Big Strong Man, draped in buffalo hides and dripping with blood, protecting his charge, keeping a home—giving Doc what he wanted fit into that. Which was fine. Maybe it was better than fine, but it wasn’t worth thinking about.

Even still, there was passion in it. Passion for what, he wasn’t sure—for Doc, maybe, but more for the concept of him. For something he represented, whatever that was. For the disgustingly greasy and enticing idea of having someone who, at any point in the day, was not only willing but eager to get fucked by you. It was horrible and decadent and comforting all at the same time, like daytime television, but he liked it. He grabbed his wrists and bit his shoulder and he was _there_ when he could have been anywhere else. He didn’t do anything he didn’t like doing. 

—

They left the panic room one after another one afternoon, Brock’s pulse still thundering. He went to drink from the eye wash station in the lab like it was a water fountain and heard the _tak tak tak_ of keyboard keys. Billy sat at the small terminal across the room and only looked up after a few moments.

“Brock? You’re never down here, what gives?”

He froze. Behind him, Doc waggled his eyebrows at Billy before he could say anything.

“We were fucking in the panic room. My knees are still shaking.”

Billy looked back at his monitor. “Oh, shut up.”

“I’m serious! Bent over a box of Christmas decorations. Smell my palms—cardboard.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Quit antagonizing him,” Brock called. He drank from the eye wash station. For whatever reason, it was the best water in the house, slightly better and colder than the upstairs bathroom, which was second best.

He heard Billy hiss to Doc, “You _wish_ you were in the panic room with him.”

—

Later that night he was lying in Doc’s bed; twice in one day wasn’t too out of the ordinary, but not common, either. He rolled his smoke between his fingers, looking down at it.

“That’s gonna bruise,” he said, motioning at Doc without looking. There was a purple-red mark on the left side of his throat where his thumb had dug in. Doc shrugged.

“I’ll wear a turtleneck.”

He would. He usually did. Marks around his wrists were harder to hide. Brock thought of earlier, of Billy almost-sort-of knowing what they were doing, and felt sick. He lived an unexamined life, largely because first with football and then with the OSI, he was told not to examine it. He had a job to do. Having a reason to look inward—and the peace of mind to do so for the first time—was troubling.

“You shouldn’t have said that stuff to Billy,” he said tightly.

“Oh, come on. He thought I was joking.”

“ _This_ time.” He ashed his smoke into the glass ashtray Doc put on the nightstand some weeks ago. “This only works if you don’t fuck with me, Doc.”

“Alright, alright. I get it.”

He sounded sour, which made sense; no one liked to be reminded that they were a carefully guarded secret. Brock wouldn’t take it back, but figured he could extend an olive branch by staying a little longer than he normally did. He always got the feeling Doc wanted him to stay. He fluffed his pillow and settled down.

“You done this before?” he asked eventually. He’d always wondered, without caring enough to actually look into it. Doc wagged his hand back and forth, _so-so_.

“Just the usual grab-ass in college. I figured I should get it out of my system before entering the super-science salt mines.”

“Why?”

“ _My_ dad? Are you kidding? He’d kill me.”

“You think? I always thought he was, uh…”

Doc snorted. “Don’t ask me how much I was forced to learn about his sex life, it’s disgusting.” He looked out the window. “The man loved his orgies, but God forbid I ever _fell_ for a guy. He’d skin me alive.”

Brock never had anyone who cared much about what or who he did, so he couldn’t relate. Again he was reminded that being raised by a gang of action figures really did a number on Doc.

“You?” Doc asked him.

“No,” he said, which was mostly a lie. He’d done stuff for work here and there, but that was different. And private.

“Figures.” Doc laughed quietly.

There was a long silence while Brock finished his cigarette. Doc looked at his phone. The city was so bright that even with the lights off, the room was fully lit; when Doc wanted to sleep, he used a remote to put the blinds down, and that’s when Brock left if he wasn’t already gone. But. There was the quiet whirr of the blinds lowering, the room got darker, and Brock stubbed out his smoke and just lay there. He could feel Doc looking at him. One moment went by, then another.

“Okay,” Doc said in response to a question he hadn’t asked. He lay down, looked at Brock again and then rolled over, apparently accepting this new order of things.

Brock turned on his side. Doc’s shoulders rose and fell with his breath. The back of his head was faintly reddish where his hair had started to grow back, due for a shave. Brock shuffled closer. With his eyes closed, he rested his forehead against Doc’s back. Doc stiffened instantly. He was so small and frail he could feel his heartbeat through his bony body, rapping quick at his spine like a rabbit’s heart. 

He mumbled, “What are we doing, Doc?”

It was rhetorical, but he wouldn’t have minded an answer. One of them had to know. There was a long, long silence and Doc relaxed somewhat.

“I’ve been a loser my entire life,” he said finally, his voice quiet and thin. “You’re one of, like, three people who look at me and don’t see it anymore. Or you stopped caring. Same thing.”

He worried Doc would ask what he saw in him, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything else. Brock meant to leave, but he fell asleep tucked against his back.

Hours later, he heard a noise and his eyes flew open.

He saw Molotov’s shock of red hair over Doc’s shoulder and his whole body twitched, springing into action before he was fully awake. He crouched naked on the bed like some animal protecting its young. Doc didn’t move an inch. Molotov stood by the open glass door with a grappling gun in her hand and neither of them moved. Her gaze roved from Brock’s hunched form to the unconscious, naked man under him, the clothes on the floor, all of it. There was a long, horrible second where neither of them spoke.

“Why isn’t he awake?” she said finally, her voice hard.

“Passed out.” Whether it was intentional or as a side-effect of something else, he knew Doc took something to sleep. He’d seen him make it all the way to the panic room floor before being yanked from his narcotics-induced slumber. “What do you want?”

“Outside.”

She stepped back through the door and out onto the terrace. Brock sat for a moment on the bed and watched her walk an agitated circle near the building’s edge. There was a time when just the sight of her drove him insane, but he felt empty then. And embarrassed. He pulled on his jeans and followed her out into the watery blue morning, the air thin and cold so high up.

“Long time no see,” he said slowly. “You need something?”

His hand hovered near his belt sheath. She had her back to him. He scanned the rooftop patio; there was a window ledge below the north face he could grab onto, window casing above he could edge his way up, and on and on. He mapped it out in his mind.

But instead of a fight, she said, “You are having sex with that sad, ugly man?”

Brock de-tensed. He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. “It’s four in the morning, do you _need something?”_

“Answer me.”

“It’s none of your business! If this isn’t a work thing, I’m—”

“Everything is a work thing, you are a secret agent.”

“Not this.”

“Yes, this. Gathers sent me to _check up on you_ like a little baby after that fuck-up with Overdose.” Her eyes flicked back towards the apartment. “I understand it now.”

“You don’t understand shit. And Hunter—”

“—will be very interested in knowing why your judgement’s been so compromised.” She worked her jaw back and forth. “You could have anyone, and you have _him_.”

“I couldn’t have _you.”_

“That’s not the point, you—”

“I can still have anyone. It’s not like that.”

“Pathetic,” she spat. “Is he paying you? I know you don’t need the money, you live like a monk—”

“He’s not _paying me_ , and keep your voice down,” he hissed. He couldn’t look at her and turned around. He pulled out his smokes and lit one, looking out over the glittering city. He missed the mountains. New York stunk like heat and shit and tar. “You wouldn’t get it, Mol, he’s—he’s _home_. It’s not anything else.”

She scoffed. “I have heard of this ‘home.’ I think most people don’t fuck their shoe racks.”

“You don’t get it,” he said again. He thought about waking up early on the Venture compound, making a cup of coffee and going outside in his bare feet to watch the sky turn pink, the grass wet, everything cool. He was thirty and bright-eyed. He didn’t know what he was now. “Wouldn’t expect you to.”

She made a frustrated noise, the noise someone made when they knew they weren’t going to win an argument. She went over to where the grappling hook was embedded in the lip of the wall and tested that it was still secure.

Quietly, as if to herself, she said, “He is the worst thing about you.”

The sun was peeking between the farthest buildings and soon it would light up the glass tower with red and gold like it was on fire.

“If I had a quarter,” Brock muttered.

Once Molotov was rappelling down the side of the building, he went back inside. He shut the patio door behind him, crept past Doc’s bed and picked his shirt up off the floor. He hesitated, standing there in the dark watching Doc sleep for longer than he’d ever admit. Then he dropped his shirt, took off his jeans and slipped into the bed. It was a while before he fell back asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Doc 'lying to himself perfectly' is a line from the venture bros making-of art book. great concept.


End file.
